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"This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides And eddied wild suns that wheeling cast The planets." just as he knows what the catkins on the willows are like, or the names of the butterflies: but he is capable, on occasion of "dragging it in," as in "The nebulous star we call the sun, If that hypothesis of theirs be sound."
Fairfax Cary, riding for the third time since the New Year from Malplaquet toward Greenwood, marked the blue March sky, the pale brown catkins by the brooks, and the white flowers of the bloodroot piercing the far-spread carpet of dead leaves. He rode rapidly, but he paused at Forrest's forge and at the mill below the ford. This also he had done before.
They hang in clusters from the hazel twigs, and in the strong March wind which blows to-day, they shake and flutter like the tails of lambs at play. Some of them leave a dusty powder on our fingers when we handle them; that is the pollen of the flower. It is not where these yellow "catkins" are dancing on the twigs to-day that the hazel nuts will appear in autumn.
Like many other plants, the hazel has two kinds of flowers, which come out before the leaves. The long pale catkins appear first, and a little later tiny crimson flowers come where the nuts are afterwards to be. Many old superstitions are connected with the hazel. Hazel-rods were used to "divine" for water and minerals by professors of an art which received the crack-jaw title of Rhabdomancy.
Whether it were that the brilliant sky, the pure country air, and the heady fragrance of the first green shoots of the poplars, the catkins of willow, and the flowers of the blackthorn had inclined his heart to open like all the nature around him; or that any long restraint was too oppressive while Caroline's sparkling eyes responded to his own, the Gentleman in Black entered on a conversation with his young companion, as aimless as the swaying of the branches in the wind, as devious as the flitting of the butterflies in the azure air, as illogical as the melodious murmur of the fields, and, like it, full of mysterious love.
The nest from Marseilles has for its barricade bits of chalky gravel, particles of earth, fragments of sticks, a few scraps of moss and especially juniper-catkins and needles. The Serignan nests, installed in Helix aspersa, have almost the same protective materials. I see bits of gravel, the size of a lentil, and the catkins and needles of the brown-berried juniper predominating.
Slowly the earth turned daily more and more toward the sun, and before we were ready to realize so much joy, the "willow-wands" were spangled with "downy silver," and the alder catkins began to unwind their long spirals, and swing pliant in the first winds of March. Then the melting airs of April set the brooks free, the frogs began to pipe, and there was rare music!
The coming of spring was my constant preoccupation through the winter, and my joy was intense at the first swelling of the buds, the coming color in the willow twigs, which ushered in the changes of spring; then the catkins, the willow leaves, and the long rains which carried off the snow, all welcome as daylight after a weary night, because they restored me to the forests and the wildflowers, the fields and the streams; and for miles around I knew every sunny spot where came the first anemones, hepaticas, and, above all, the trailing arbutus, joy of my childhood, the little white violets, their yellow sisters, then the "dog-tooth violet," and a long list of flowers whose names I have forgotten long ago.
The delicate sprays of the birch are fringed with them, the aspen has a load of brown, there are green catkins on the bare hazel boughs, and the willows have white 'pussy-cats. The horse-chestnut buds the hue of dark varnish have enlarged, and stick to the finger if touched; some are so swollen as to nearly burst and let the green appear.
We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground, always in the larval state. In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the willows, and other trees.
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